Dress Disasters

Hi!

Thanks to everyone who watched last week and to those of you who posted on my blog. Your comments are much appreciated. This week I would like to set the record straight about a few things that happen on this episode. A lot of people, strangers and friends, have asked me, "why didn't you move the dresses?" I did move the dresses! The first problem was lack of space in the house for the dresses to dry. I moved as many as I could into Rachel's two bathrooms, but the dyes in the dresses were bleeding and they had to be spaced apart so that while they were drying the dyes didn't run on to the other dresses. Rachel would have freaked out if I moved them on the areas where there were hardwood floors. I looked for the dresses that were either dripping dye or those that were sitting in pools of dyed water. It was quite a disaster! Believe me. The remaining dresses were left in the studio, spaced out on other racks so that they were not touching one another. You have to understand that these racks of gowns were our selections for awards season, we had worked very hard to get them, so I was not about to let them sit there and get ruined. It was such a disaster!

Also, I did not just take off and leave everything sitting there. I had a short amount of time to deal with the flood in the studio because I had to go to a client's house to get them ready for a red carpet appearance.

So I looked for the most ruined and problematic dresses and made sure they were taken care of first. Some of them were just a little wet on the hem and others were dyed a completely different color. There was dye running off of one red dress and it made a pool of blood red water underneath one of the racks. You can imagine what happened to the dresses that were sitting in this water...what was once white, was now red, etc...

I have to say I was a little surprised when Rachel gave me the first strike. I understand that she did not think that I acted quickly enough, but I did have the contractor called right away to assess the situation. We later found out that the water heater was leaking. Everything is a learning curve and I realized that the only thing I could do was take Rachel's advice to "react quicker." This advice came in handy when Fedex did not show up on Saturday, the day of Debra's final fitting and the day before the SAG awards. Rachel was unhappy with the options for Debra and wanted me to hustle some more dresses, which I did and I had AMAZING stuff coming. Fedex usually comes at 12:00pm on Saturday so when 12:30pm rolled around and there wasn't one box, I got really nervous and called Fedex (which I have to do more than you would think. I call them A LOT). Due to the severe rain we were having at that time, the planes had been grounded and my packages were stuck in Tennessee.

I was freaking out because we basically had no new options to show Debra, with only a few hours before the final fitting. Huge disaster! I began calling some of my contacts to see if they could help me, but with the awards the next day most gowns were out or already spoken for. I was sooo surprised when Fedex appeared at the studio door with all of my packages. I have no idea how they got from Tennessee to LA in such a short time or whether they were ever there, but the point is they arrived and Debra was going to have new options to try. As for the wet dresses, miraculously there were only a few with permanent damage, the others dried beautifully.